Almost 7,500 copyrighted books are available free online

Most books come from paper source

By Planet eBook Editor
August 31, 2001

A recent news item by Reuters reports how the search specialist company, Envisional, has found that there are more than 7,000 copyrighted books available free online.

"This is the first original research showing that top authors such as J.K. Rowling (creator of Harry Potter) and John Grisham are being ripped off by Internet pirates," British-based company Envisional reportedly said.

Interestingly the company found that a minority of the copyrighted eBooks had been cracked from their electronic form (such as eBooks for Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader and Microsoft Reader), instead most were found to have come from the paper version -- scanned and converted to a popular electronic file format.

Pirates Invade Book Publishing

Author and journalist M.J. Rose first reported similar findings last year in her Pirates Invade Book Publishing article for Wired. According to the article, there were roaming sites on the Web where enthusiasts go to share pirated copies of many popular books. As the sites got busted, they would move on to another location, until once again they were discovered.

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